There's no way that the first flight will be a glide test. It will be captive carry up and down.

I found it entertaining that Alan pointed out on Mojave Skies that Oshkosh won't be the first appearance of WK2 at an airshow, since they did a fly by, landing, and taxi past this month's Plane Crazy, the show put on by the Mojave Transportation Museum.

However the UK firm came to the conclusion that the volume within which SS2 carries its solid rocket motor and nitrous oxide supply could equally hold a liquid chemical propulsion system capable of providing enough thrust for long enough for a horizontal take-off and ascent to 50,000ft and above without the need for WK2

~15 kilometers isn't that impressive and WAY below the 100 km official space boundary. Most fighter aircraft can reach or surpass that altitude.

People sometimes forget, that suborbital doesn't automatically mean into space. Heck, even if I throw a stone I could call it suborbital :p

However the UK firm came to the conclusion that the volume within which SS2 carries its solid rocket motor and nitrous oxide supply could equally hold a liquid chemical propulsion system capable of providing enough thrust for long enough for a horizontal take-off and ascent to 50,000ft and above without the need for WK2

~15 kilometers isn't that impressive and WAY below the 100 km official space boundary. Most fighter aircraft can reach or surpass that altitude.

People sometimes forget, that suborbital doesn't automatically mean into space. Heck, even if I throw a stone I could call it suborbital :p

The 'interesting' term is 'above'. There's no indication that it's only up to 50,000 feet. I think the sub-orbital mark is 62km and therefore if they are saying that SS2 could be sub-orbital on its own without WK2, then isn't it reasonable to suppose that it can make this altitude in this context

Hi, actually I wanted to post that in the morning, but just as I hit "Submit", the forum was unfortunately unreachable.

So here is my post - with a little bit delay

Quote:

it's ~62 miles or ~100 km if you want to consider it as space tourism.

62 km is way below the space boundary and the stated 50000+ feet is a "joke" in comparison. That's only about 15 km (which is a "whopping" 2 km above the service ceiling of an Airbus A380 btw ). In the context of the article I would consider the "above" just as "and maybe a bit more". To me, there is absolutely no indication that it's performance could be scaled up by a factor of 6 or 7!